


What Happens in Vegas...

by Letterblade



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gambling, Gen, POV Second Person, Temporary Character Death, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-02
Updated: 2011-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xaldin goes hunting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happens in Vegas...

**Author's Note:**

> This fic had its origins in the KH fan LARP that my girlfriend are always planning and will never write. (We do write a lot of LARPs, but fan LARPs are difficult to run and find players for.) Which is probably why it insisted upon being written in the second person, which is standard for LARP character sheets in our circles, but unusual for fic. Sigh.

You've rolled in from Her Majesty's Island with a new suit so sharp you could shave with it and a stack of chips in your pocket that could bankrupt a small nation. One, just one, tossed on the green flocked table, could feed a family for a year. Some of them were from dead man's hands, but most you took from the living. Cleaned out the biggest riverside mob without blinking an eye, skipped town, and got a new ring in your ear. That's how you roll.

This city has sprung up like flowers in the desert, impossibly bright. Just add water. Flowers beckon you from street-corners, thumbs running along their impossibly short skirts, and you just laugh and wave your hand. You can warm your dick later; right now, you need cards under your fingertips, chips stacked in front of you, _life_.

You saunter into the casino, sit under five security cameras, and cheat like crazy, because you're just that good. So what if this is the sort of place where cheaters meet broken bottles in back alleys? So what if you put your life on the line with every flick of a card into the right place in the deck? Nothing's worth living unless you're risking _something._

Two whiskeys, neat; a stack of chips, messy. Hours pass. The tourists trickle out, leaving only the hard-eyed men with faces of stone, and you slowly scour them out, scratch your goatee, and smile.

Late, and your stomach growls, but you're on a nice little streak and you. Don't. Care. There's a dip in the conversation and a rush of low voices, as if something frightening has just come in the door, and you look up, curious.

White guys with dreads aren't supposed to be anything but laughable.

But this guy--hell, he's alone. Hands folded casually behind his back. White guy with dreads. And yet--powerfully built, barrel-chested, maybe early thirties. Black hair in long and snakey dreads, bushy eyebrows, a truly ferocious set of muttonchops, and the sort of presence that makes old casino men shuffle their chairs sideways and look decidedly down at their cards as he strides past them. He's wearing a plain black suit, very secret service, and has a wide-gauge steel-lined tunnel in one of his ears, holding a heavy silver ring.

The rest of your table folds and clears out as he sits. Maybe it's just the whiskey, spiced with fear, but there's this strange, skin-crawling _aura_ to him. Something at the base of your spine screams _wrong, wrong, wrongwrongwrong_ as he breathes the same air as you. You take it as encouragement to stay.

You tap your fingertips on your elbow, old habit, and calculate odds. Casino security? Somebody the mob sent across the puddle to whack you? Your heart beats lumpity-thump in your ears, and the danger makes you thrum. Million-dollar chip on a green zero as the wheel ratchets along. You've never bet your life before. Maybe this will be the day.

"Shall we?" he asks, almost casual, and drops a single chip on the table.

You smile, propose something two-player and incredibly risky, and he nods. The dealer's left with the rest, so you shuffle, move a few cards about, and deal.

He plays conservatively as all hell, and it's _disappointing._ Still, you stay at the table with him, because you're still too damn curious.

When you look up after winning the third game, the room is empty, and there's no light showing under the door.

"Work here, do you?" you ask.

"Whoever you think I am, you're wrong," he says pleasantly. "I've got enough left for one last hand. Are you curious?"

You laugh, rich and easy, and finish your third whiskey.

"Well, you're got _my_ number," and you intend it as a lie, but maybe it's closer to the truth than you'd like to admit. "Let's go all in, then. Unless that's too risky for your blood?"

"It's your risk," he says, mild, and picks up his cards.

You pile up enough chips to bankrupt the place, and bluff.

He cleans you out.

Hand by hand, card by card. You feel like you're eight again and playing with the big boys who counted your cards by your eyebrows. Your empty glass shatters in your hand as he pulls across the last of your chips.

He'd been playing to lose. Until now. Your gut turns somersaults. You've cleaned out twenty-year veterans on three continents. Who the fuck is this guy?

"Your tells," he says quietly, when he's done, "are obvious."

"I don't have tells," you whisper. You've been practicing in the mirror since you were eleven. And you are not, exactly, a young man.

He steeples his hands and looks at you-- _into_ you--and his eyes, the color of a stormy late sunset, are like scalpels. "You have a heart," he murmurs. "Of course you have tells. Do you want to play one more hand?"

You spread your arms wide, never showing uncertainty. "Asks the man who cleaned me out. I'm not sure the security guys would appreciate a strip show. Though the suit's worth something." You can't leave now. Not until you know who he is. Your watch; that would be a good ante. It's expensive, won't leave you naked under those eyes.

He wipes the back of his hand across the table, and the chips go tumbling and bouncing to the floor. An avalanche of fortune. Your gut twists. Never play with a man who doesn't have chips on the table; isn't that one of the rules?

You're even now. And you don't play by the rules.

"I ante a question," he says. "Winner gets to ask the loser one question, on whatever honor he believes himself to have."

You laugh. No honor for you. Him? He's got his dreads tied in a fucking samurai topknot. How the hell are you supposed to know what kind of honor he has?

"Then I'll ante the same."

You're not sure what the point of this hand is. He's better than you, and you don't know _how_. Winning and losing is between him and Lady Luck, and you don't get a say in it. This isn't cards. This is fucking _roulette_.

And you smile as you deal. You like roulette too. It's all good. Even if dreads-boy has weighted the wheel.

You win one question. Luck or breadcrumbs, a trail to draw you in? "Who sent you?" you ask, after a moment of consideration.

"I am under the command of a man called Xemnas." Not employ, command. Like he's military. What the hell kind of a code-name is Xemnas? "However, my presence here is entirely at my discretion. I was not sent for you. You simply caught my interest."

You're not sure whether to be pleased or insulted.

Another round goes by, and he wins a question, and at this point you are so far beyond fear and into curiosity that you don't even care. "Well?"

"Do you want to be like me?" he asks, and his voice is low, intense, and shattering.

You want so badly to lie. To him. To yourself. You swallow against a dry, dry mouth, and scratch your goatee, and blurt, "Yes."

He folds up his hand and pushes his chair back. "If that is true, then you should come with me. If you have lied, then you should waste no more of my time."

And he turns and strides out, leaving a billion dollars scattered on the floor, unwanted.

Your blood runs cold in your veins, and you follow him. And in the shadowy depths of the empty casino, you think you see inhuman forms craning in the darkness.

* * *

He takes you to a nice hotel and puts out the do not disturb card.

You're not particularly queer; you like the ladies, and you had _reasons_ for blowing that bookie. When you have time for that sort of thing, between games. And you're not entirely sure where this is going when he says, "There's something you need to understand," and undoes his tie. Unbuttons his shirt, and yanks it open.

There, half-hidden by thick, dark hair, you see his scars. Terrible claw marks. Ridges an inch deep over his heart, healed up lurid and stiff. Patches where the hair doesn't grow.

"Give me your hand," he says, and places it over his heart, and you're too busy staring at his scars to make some crack about the gayness of this all.

His skin is ice cold. His chest is still as stone.

A chill runs down your spine, and you step closer, duck your head a little, and lay your ear against his chest, your new piercing stinging with the pressure.

Silence.

"You're dead," you breathe.

"No," he says, and you can hear that rich voice of his echoing in his big chest. "I died once. And I now I continue to exist without my heart."

Your head spins. _You have a heart. Of course you have tells._

"How?" you ask, because you're curious, and because you never fold when the game's interesting.

"I could kill you," he says, mildly, "and then you'll find out."

If this is a hit man, he's one hell of a crazy hit man. And the walking dead. If he's a hit man, you're probably as dead as he is already. Been dead for a couple of hours.

"Wait," you say, and pull out a quarter from your pocket. Left over from the slots. "On tails, I walk out that door." Are you betting your life yet?

You flick it up, and it arcs, glittering. Catch, smack on your sleeve. Your heart soars. Oh, this is beautiful, you think, this moment before your hand moves away. When your life is decided but you don't yet know. What will it be, Lady Luck?

Heads.

He smiles.

"You may not survive it," he says. "You may simply die, if you're not strong enough to keep existing after you lose your heart."

You let the coin drop to the carpet and laugh. "Give me the odds on that, then."

"General populace, a thousand to one that any individual will survive, and a million to one that they'll survive in a recognizable form."

"I'm not the general populace."

"No. You're not. For you..." He cocks his head, looking at you with those dissecting eyes. "Evens for physical survival. Twenty to one against your mind remaining intact."

"Oh, now _that's_ more like it." You spread your arms and laugh. Bet your life, bet your soul, bet your very existence, oh, fuck, yes. "Go ahead. Kill me."

He takes you by the shoulders and shoves. Drops you flat on your back on the plush hotel mattress, straddles you, and raises his broad hand high above his head.

The room goes cold.

Wind bursts from nowhere, searing dusty across your skin. The windows rattle. The memo pad bursts into a flock of sheets, sprayed over the ceiling.

He smiles down at you, sharp and merciless. The open front of his shirt snaps and flutters. His dreads shift in the wind, coiling like snakes over his shoulders, and his eyes are empty as the sky. Your heart beats loud and bloody in your ears, and dice rattle, and there's no heat coming from his body.

A spear forms in his hand.

Five more hover around him, long and wicked, points carved into jagged silhouettes like the mouths of dragons. They slip through your shirt cuffs, pants legs, the side of your collar, easy as razors through hair, and sink so deep into the mattress that you hear springs pop and shriek. You're limp and heavy with fear, pinned, pulse frantic against the cold steel shaft of the lance at your throat. Somewhere in your chest, something's protesting, warm and glimmering and uneasy, but you bite the inside of your cheek and laugh, low and soft, because if a white guy with dreads could turn into a god of wind and lances, well, you're sure as hell curious about what you'll become.

He rips open your shirt, and buttons pop and soar away in the wind.

The tip of his last lance touches your bare skin, and it's so sharp that you barely feel it. Blood, warm and slippery, trickling down your side. Stings. He draws a circle round your beating heart, and somewhere above you the bulbs burst with a tinkling, and shards of glass whirl through the room, and everything goes dark.

"Let it go." His voice drips like black velvet through the room. "Transcend what you are." Darkness crawls across your skin, and you're pretty sure you're not screaming, but how the hell are you supposed to know? "Cast away your greed and fear, and unlock the true power of your will."

Time stops, dice come up yo-leven, and every shaking gibbering chip-grabbing weakness you've ever had comes crawling out of your chest. Your body goes deathly cold. He's frozen above you, poised, caught in the middle of breathing by whatever crazy shit the world's pulling around you--

\-- _you're doing it?_ \--

\--as time shuffles through your fingers like a pack of cards, seconds snapping against each other, and you flip over the suicide king and smile--

\--greed and recklessness and fear and addiction and loneliness crouch like an incubus on your chest, blinking yellow lantern eyes, little black claws scrabbling, and you can't feel your body anymore, and a tunnel of inky darkness opens around you--

* * *

Millennia later, you tumble out on the cold white floor of nowhere.

 _He_ stands over you, and instead of his suit, he's wearing a long black leather coat. Strange creatures flank him, mismatched wriggling assemblies of purplish-white spandex and spines. The ceiling goes on forever.

You look down at yourself, and you're naked. Skin cold and clammy. You don't have feet, and as you watch, they slowly meld themselves into existence, writhing darkness coalescing into bone and muscle and skin.

You think vaguely that you should be creeped out, but you're not. Just observing calmly. You lay a hand over your chest, over a faint circle of scars, and it's silent and empty.

He holds out a coat, just like his, and drapes it around your shoulders. Then holds out a hand to help you up.

Your new feet work about as well as the old ones.

He steps close and holds up a little piece of metal. A stud earring, a strange cross-like symbol. The same design gleams white-steel-on-white on the nearby wall. He turns your head with two fingers under your jaw, and delicately unhooks the big loop in your lobe with leather-gloved hands, and puts in the stud.

You can't quite remember how to talk, yet, but you nod, satisfied. That feels right. New country, new bling. It's how you roll.

"Welcome," he says, low and sonorous, "to Organization XIII. I am III, Xaldin. Come with me. The Superior will name you."

As you walk, another creature sidles up behind you, similar to the ones that wriggle alongside Xaldin. A shifting, vaguely humanoid figure, wrapped in draping triangles of pinkish _something_ , and it chitters, and holds out a card.

You take it, flip it over in your hand--suicide king--and laugh, soft and pleased and hollow.


End file.
